‘The Dog Stars’ Review – Ridley Scott’s Post-Apocalyptic Picture Is An Admirably Meditative But Vapid Mixture Of Half-Baked Ideas

Ridley Scott’s legacy as a director and auteur sits at a fascinating place within the modern era of film, not because his status is in doubt, as films like Alien and Blade Runner are forever classics for a reason, but rather because of the discussion on where exactly he sits when it comes to his recent output. Depending on the cinephile you ask, Scott has either still got it or lost whatever skill he had ages ago; these debates exist in the eras of every popular director, even Spielberg, throughout large stretches of the 2010s, but even in his late stages there’s always a captivating nature to his features. Even some of his most divisive works, like Napoleon and House of Gucci, have always had a fascinating quality to their existence that makes his late-stage work captivating regardless of the script.

The Dog Stars is unfortunately Scott’s first in a long while where the haphazard nature of the film isn’t even fascinating to watch, as virtually every aspect of this post-apocalyptic story is on autopilot. In its dystopia-rooted world-building, meditative themes on grief and isolation, and thin character writing, the film is either half-baked or explores something that was done a thousand times better in other post-apocalyptic stories. There are always a few successful, quieter moments of melancholy or thrilling action spurts, but The Dog Stars cements itself as both the weakest and most prodigiously empty of Scott’s most recent works.

The year is 2035, and the world as we know it has been ravaged by a pandemic due to a deadly virus (sound familiar?), and those who haven’t died from the virus are left to fend for themselves in what is now a new, incredibly bleak normal. We follow Hig (Jacob Elordi), a former mechanic grieving his wife (Sai Bennett) and spending most of his dystopian days hanging out with his dog Jasper and using his plane to fly in and out of their new home just outside Denver, Colorado, to gather leftover supplies in the empty streets of the city.

When Hig and Jasper aren’t bringing supplies to Mormons close to them, led by Aaron (Benedict Wong), they reside in their airplane hangar with Bangley (Josh Brolin), a rugged and gruff gunman whom Hig works with. They normally keep a lookout for raiders trying to invade their land and have formed a solid relationship, even if the two don’t see eye to eye on their views of what life in an ended world should look like.

During some of his lonesome flights, Hig has received a mysterious radio transmission coming from the supposed safe haven of Grand Junction. After an unfortunate encounter with ravagers leads to a tragic event, Hig decides to finally venture out beyond his home to find the source of the sound and maybe any glimmer of hope that might remain in the world. Along the way, he meets Cima (Margret Qualley) and her father, Pops (Guy Pearce), and the three attempt to find anything that can be considered home given the circumstances.

This will sound like a backhanded compliment, but The Dog Stars tends to be at its best when it’s at one with the silent emptiness of its slower moments and this specific viewpoint of what the end of the world is. Any resemblance to building out how lonesome it can be on such empty streets captures a proper soothing feel to them early on, the melancholic nature of the film’s meditative thematics on grief and the loss of human connection in the midst of dystopia. Some of the film’s best moments are just Elordi wandering around the wasteland with luscious airplane cinematography by Scott and DP Erik Messerschmidt. Most of the cast also performs well in the Neo-Western, especially Josh Brolin, who is clearly having the most fun here.

For every slight positive in the film, however, there’s a major caveat that undermines everything in Mark L. Smith’s sterile screenplay. The attempts at quieter reflections on Hig’s grief and the lives of those around him are appreciated, but the movie ruins it by refusing to dig deeper into already baseline themes and by delivering atrocious dialogue between characters. The film knows how to tell us about Hig’s and other characters’ grief after a major event that uprooted the entire way they live (obvious COVID allegory), but it can’t effectively showcase it at all, resulting in a movie that falls flat anytime it tries to dig deeper into its themes to feel quite literally anything emotionally.

Any scene that relies on the characters we follow in this story, instead of the softer ambiance amidst survival, is so painful to watch, in large part from how bad both the dialogue and character writing can be. So many scenes between Elordi and Qualley specifically entail them basically telling the audience how to feel when they have an emotional exchange. There exists virtually no nuance to any of the storytelling here and it leads to a weird area the screenplay resides in where it’s only half committed to both the story’s darker elements and the apparent big heart it tries to convince you has been the core of the whole film in the end.

Then there’s the worldbuilding of the post-apocalypse itself, which starts fine enough before it simultaneously transforms into an undercooked, bizarrely out-of-place tonal and story shift. The best way to describe The Dog Stars’ world is that it’s a Frankenstein of so many other post-apocalyptic films, from I Am Legend to a full crossover into other subgenres with 28 Days Later, but the central problem lies in the fact that there’s virtually no interesting hook to speak of here.

There’s a crew of reapers apparently hunting down the last of the survivors that are just obstacles whenever the film needs an action scene, and even a point where there’s a “twist” of sorts in the story when Allison Janney’s character is introduced, where the film randomly transforms into a different dystopia film entirely that it wasn’t trying to be before or after it’s introduced. It’s a dull, watered-down hodgepodge of conceptually cool ideas that don’t get the proper development. Even impressively directed action moments from Scott, like a night vision sequence where Brolin is gunning down raiders, could’ve been completely cut from the film and nothing of thematic or plot relevance would’ve been lost.

Ridley Scott will always have a keen eye for direction, and he shows so in a few thrilling and admirably soothing moments of this movie, but The Dog Stars is his first film in a long while that has almost no pulse to it at all. A dull mashing together of familiar ideas that the screenplay can’t give proper depth to, The Dog Stars isn’t just a forgettably bland post-apocalypse movie but a forgettable Ridley Scott movie, and in a world where even the shakiest of his late-stage work was still conceptually engaging, it’s dispiriting to witness.

The Dog Stars will debut exclusively in theaters on August 28, 2026, courtesy of 20th Century Studios. 

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